I don’t know if I’ll keep doing this could be just a whim. I’ve been thinking about it for a while now. Today what got me to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard was all this business about the Afghan girl in National Geographic. Here’s why. This girl—the eyes mostly—had a hold on me from the time I was a kid. I used to see it in the diner where my old man took me on Saturdays. I saw it all over the place really. She was just there, one of those things like Its the Real Thing Coke, or Ghostbusters, that you can’t stop seeing. But it wasn’t til we deployed that I even got that she was Afghan. I was something like 7 when the 1st photo came out. I mean, I think I thought she was an indian. As in cowboys and indians. Then I saw this National Geographic while we were here about how they tried to find her. And they couldn’t and couldn’t. But they did. And when I saw what happened to her—it blew me sky high. You know they had to use iris scanning technology to make sure it was her. That’s how much she changed. But she was only 27! X, she was your age. She looked older than my mom.

I can’t tell you how long I stared at those two pictures. I still do. I don’t keep them lying around for anyone to see. But I put them in here so you could take a look. Unbelievable isn’t it? Tells you a lot right there about the difference between life here and life back home. And you know what else? She liked the Taliban. (Said something about how it brought peace.)

The other thing that got me going is the feeling I’ve had ever since we first deployed. The feeling that we lived through something that people will be talking about after we’re gone. But today one of the flyboys got me going about how it was going to get to be like Veteran’s Day 30 percent off sale, Memorial Day no down payment extravaganza at Chrysler. One day, there’ll be stuff that makes us want to puke about it. They won’t remember this feeling I am living right now that we have something in our lives that means something.